A new Rasmussen poll reveals that 58% of people polled would like to see Flight 253 bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tortured for information. It is not just an indictment of our values but another byproduct of President Obama’s blocking of any independent investigation and prosecution of torture under the Bush Administration. By protecting Bush officials, Obama is reinforcing their argument that such measures are merely controversial and not crimes.

The poll asked individuals: “Should waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques be used to gain information from the suspected bomber?” The result was 58% yes, to only 30% who said no. I was asked the same question during this segment of The Situation Room.

What is astonishing is that this poll occurred virtually as people were leaving for churches and synagogues to celebrate the holidays. I guess that walking on water thing was just a prelude to waterboarding the Pharisees.

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we respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American.”

This will be key to whatever decision this administration makes.
Obumbo campaigned that this would be his approach to the healthcare debate. Will this be another broken promise and more proof of a shadow government or will it be the most transparent administration ever. I doubt the transparent thing, Obumbo won’t even show the original data, he wants to hide the decline.

Maybe he should force Rasmussen to hire Professor Michael Mann to hide the decline in his approval numbers.

The head of C-SPAN has implored Congress to open up the last leg of health care reform negotiations to the public, as top Democrats lay plans to hash out the final product among themselves.

C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb wrote to leaders in the House and Senate Dec. 30 urging them to open “all important negotiations, including any conference committee meetings,” to televised coverage on his network.

“The C-SPAN networks will commit the necessary resources to covering all of the sessions LIVE and in their entirety,” he wrote.

Lamb urged Congress in his letter to fling open the doors in the final stretch of the negotiations.

“President Obama, Senate and House leaders, many of your rank-and-file members, and the nation’s editorial pages have all talked about the value of transparent discussions on reforming the nation’s health care system,” he wrote. “Now that the process moves to the critical stage of reconciliation between the chambers, we respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American.”

I think you’re missing the point. Communism fails because it doesn’t take into account that people are sometimes lazy, self interested, and power hungry; your own bias is to over look that people are not always rational or self interested. Either way the main failing is the ignoring of human nature.

Look at it this way: evolution isn’t always about individuals survival. Just as often it’s about the survival of the group. That’s why sickle cell anemia is so common in Africa. A single copy of the gene helps to provide a limited sort of immunity to Malaria (to risk over-simplification). So it benefits the group as a whole if a certain percentage has a copy of the genes that (I think it’s around 30%). The same goes for what we’d call personality traits. That includes being greedy, being a gossip (it helps establish in a group who can be relied upon and who can’t), aggressiveness, self sacrifice, etc. It benefits the group (probably around the size of the small tribes that were common for the development of humanity) for a certain number to be rationally self interested and another percentage to be selfless and charitable, and some mix of the two to be gossips, etc. so that’s how we’re wired in general.

Any philosophy that acts like that isn’t true is just as doomed to failure as one that thinks people don’t need to eat.